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SPIRITUAL FORCES IN 
AMERICAN HISTORY 



A Sermon 

Preached at the Seventy-third Annual Meeting of 
The Congregational Home Missionary Society, in Hartford, Conn. 

May 23, 1899 



By President John Henry Barrows, D.D. 

of Oberlin College 



The Congregational Home Missionary Society 

1899 






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SPIRITUAL FORCES IN AMERICAN HISTORY. 

Sermon preached for the Seventy-third Anniversary 
OF THE Congregational Home Missionary /Society, 
Hartford, Conn., BY President John Henry Barrows, 
D.D.,oF Oberlin College, May 230, 1899. 

Text— John 6:63 : "It is the Spirit that quickeneth." 

No deeper words were ever spoken by our Lord. They touch 
the roots of individual and social life. 

We may well consider them at this Missionary Anniversary, for 
they express the fundamental principles of all our effort. In the 
belief that it is the Spirit only that giveth life, that the forces of 
Christian Faith, Hope and Love are essential to personal and 
national well-being, this Hortie Missionary organization has carried 
on its fruitful work for nearly three-quarters of a century, touching 
with divine vitality the ever-expanding domain of the Republic. It 
is this truth that has burned in the souls of those Christian men and 
women who have followed our civilization in its majestic march to 
the Pacific. 

In the light of it we may well review the victories of the past, 
study the problems and perils of to-day, and peer into the future 
with a wise, unfaltering Faith. 

From the beginning, American Christianity has given the su- 
preme place to spiritual forces, in the conviction that man's foremost 
need is the renewal of his nature by the spirit of God. The largest 
influence in our national life has been the Christian teaching and 
temper, which have lead the churches to seek, first of all, the regen- 
eration of the human soul and the upbuilding of noble character after 
the pattern of Christ. On the continent of Europe the effort by 
Church and State is to govern and educate men from without. It is 
by submission, by discipline, by intellectual skill, by institutions, 
that men are to be fitted to become servants of the State. The 
Puritan idea has always gone deeper. The Puritan purpose has ever 
been to reach and renew the soul. Captain Mahan prophesied victory 
for our armies on account of the superiority of American over 



Spanish manhood ; but back of this superiority are the great control- 
ling ideas of American Christianity; and in this respect they are in 
harmony with the fundamental teachings of Jesus Christ. He came 
to found a kingdom of renewed souls. What Socrates and Cicero 
never saw, the great apostle to the Gentiles beheld in the cities of 
Greece and Italy — men regenerated, born into a new life. 

We profoundly believe in bettering human environment. Im- 
proved environment should make easier the great work of the 
Church — the work of renewing men. But better conditions and 
external improvements are notable to meet, of themselves, the radical 
needs of human nature. They profit nothing simply in the sense 
that they do not impart life. The blinded efforts of some people to 
cure this world suggest the picture of a man whitewashing a pest- 
house, or opening schools and missions for children bitten by mad 
dogs. A wild Russian wolf may be chained and partially subdued, 
and be even made to eat bread; but you slip the chain and give him 
liberty, and the wolf nature asserts itself, and the next winter he will 
be thirsting for the blood of children in the wilds of Siberia. A 
man may have all that this world can do for him, and be ripe for 
perdition. Perhaps the most horrible disclosures which have come 
to notice during our lifetime have been made in connection with 
the highest social products of civilization. Men who have been born 
to those conditions of wealth which so many sigh for, who had their 
training in the schools and in all the respectabilities of life, have 
shown that their hearts were with the swine. In comparison with 
some of the polluted men of culture and leisure in the world's chief 
cities, the so-called barbarians of Germany whom Tacitus described 
were angels from heaven. The three devils, of cruelty, lust, and 
greed, are not to be cast out by gold, by luxury, or by aesthetics. If 
in 1869 you had walked through the beautiful streets of Paris, you 
would have seen the gayest of capitals, with the best theatres, the 
most extensive and attractive art-galleries, in the world, and you 
would have smiled had a prophet told you that there were savages 
underneath all this show and glitter who within a year would outdo 
the horrors of Central Africa. 

That which is born of the flesh may be decked in silken robes 
and given a dressing of culture, and set in the midst of gardens and 
galleries, but it still remains flesh. 

As the grain of sand is dead, and can become living matter only 
by contact with the life of plant or animal, so, in accordance with 
spiritual biology, the dead soul, however beautiful with intellectual 
accomplishments, must be renewed by the touch of the Spirit of God. 



These truths have given incentive to those Christian activities 
which in America have absorbed the greater part of our efforts. 
Since, without the renewal of their natures, men remain outside the 
Kingdom of Heaven, the disciples of Christ can never, in their 
devotion to better institutions, neglect the chief work of the Church. 
We are shocked by the blasphemy and infidelity to Christ of the 
great hierarchies which exalt external conformity to the Church 
above internal conformity to the Spirit. And therefore American 
Christianity has put foremost those institutions and efforts which 
evangelize men and build them up in Christian faith and character. 
This missionary century has exploded the idea that a pagan nation 
must first be taught all the arts of civilization before it can be ready 
for Christ. We know that whenever men learn the story of God's 
love, whenever their minds are so open that they feel its touch on 
their souls, then they clothe their nakedness, build new houses, plow 
the soil, demand education for their children. The missionary is 
the greatest civilizer, whether in Central Asia or Central Montana. 
The chief evangelizers of nations have wrought beneficent changes, 
compared with which the work of warriors and kings has been feeble 
and short-lived. Mr. Gladstone always saw and felt that Christianity 
was at the basis of liberty, justice, progress, and prosperity. I once 
ventured to send him a note of grateful appreciation, after reading 
one of his wisest essays on the truth of the Gospel history, and he 
kindly sent me a word of thanks for my estimate of the service that 
he endeavored to render to the cause which, as he said, ''was at the 
basis of all good causes." 

Think of the immeasurable influence which John Knox became 
to Scotland, and you may well believe that if St. Patrick had lived a 
thousand years later, and been the John Knox of Ireland; if the 
regenerating truth of the Gospel had entered more fully the lives of 
that lovable but priest-ridden people, or if English landlordism had 
been as earnest in evangelism as in the exaction of rents, Ireland 
might to-day be another Scotland. 

Had the Church of France been reorganized in the sixteenth 
century on the truths in the third chapter of John's Gospel, that 
nation might have been spared both St. Bartholemew and the French 
Revolution. 

The State Churches of Europe have always been willing to com- 
promise with these truths; but to-dav there are leading minds in 
Germany crying for a new reformation, that shall make the new 
birth the condition of church membership; which shall insist on a 
spiritual life, and shall bring to the turbulent and unbelieving masses 



the Gospel which has made the common people of New England the 
most potent promoters of freedom, industry, law, and civilization, 
that the world ever knew. The primal need of our imperiled cities 
is to bring their unevangelized thousands to the knowledge of that 
Gospel which is able to renew them as well as the barbarians of the 
Congo. Culture cannot take the place of conscience; conscience 
loses efficacy when men cease to feel that God is behind it and in it. 

This rapid statement of some of our fundamental convictions is 
made as an all-sufficient justification of the plan and purpose of this 
Society to give its strength to the preaching of the Gospel. This 
Society has said, "Let America flourish, like the old city of Glas- 
gow, by the preaching of the word " — not by institutionalism or 
ritualism. Such was the divine thought that gave new lustre to the 
eyes and thrilled in the voice of Dr. Clapp, the great-hearted Secre- 
tary we miss and mourn to-night and shall love evermore. 

We believe that it is the Spirit that giveth life. It is not a difficult 
thesis to maintain, in such a company as this, that spiritual forces 
are indispensable to our very existence as a free people. We believe 
that six generatious of oblivion of these truths, that two hundred 
years of history shaped by ideas, forces and institutions directly 
opposed to the ideas, forces and institutions which have made the 
true and better America, would certainly take us out of the list of 
living and put us into the category of the dying nations. On such con- 
victions as we have thus indicated Connecticut was founded. On 
such a creed New England was built. With such ideas the " May- 
flower" was freighted. 

We rejoice that we are assembled in this historic church, and 
in this city, where we feel the perfect unity of home and foreign 
missions as fully as do Americans dwelling beneath our flag in 
Porto Rico or Luzon. In coming to Hartford, the Home Mission- 
ary Society returns to a chief fountain-head of Christian patriotism, 
one of the main sources of that higher Americanism which has been 
dominated by Christian faith. We do not forget what the splendid 
genius and powerful spirit of Bushnell wrought for our nobler life. 
We do not fail to remember the Seminary, which has manned our 
missionary enterprises, nor the generous givers who have so con- 
stantly maintained them. It has often been said that one must go 
west of the Alleghanies to find America. I do not believe it. I 
have lived on both sides of the Appalachian Ridges, and I have 
found the true America, throbbing and vital, resolute and inde- 
pendent, east as well as west of their beautiful summits. I look 
upon New England as the mother of genuine Americanism, and as a 



chief builder of our nationality ; and no one understands either the 
past, the present or the future of the American Republic who is not 
in sympathy with the ideas of which New England has been both the 
champion and the expression. It is impossible to account for the 
American nationality, either in its origin, its controlling purposes, 
its development, or its apparent destiny, without recognizing its 
vital connection with those Biblical forces which colonized Massa- 
chusetts and Connecticut. The American nation is a growth into 
whose majestic strength new elements have been added from age to 
age, so that it stands to-day like the California pine, with a trunk 
broad enough to be the shade of an army, while it waves its top in 
the sunlight of God, higher than any other of the magnificent 
growths of the past. But to find the nation's germ we must go back 
of constitutions and revolutions and later emigrations, to the Chris- 
tian purposes of those men who fled from corruptions and tyrannies 
of the Old World and battled with the savage and the soil, the winter 
and wilderness, in the New. There has been a strange diversity, 
indicating, however, a substantial unity, in the accounts which his- 
torical students have given of our beginnings. One historian traces 
the origin of our nationality to the pastor of the Pilgrims, John 
Robinson of Leyden; and with a similar insight Bancroft discovered 
it in the cabin of the " Mayflower." Rufus Clioate tracked it to John 
Calvin in Geneva, and others have been content to follow it to the 
teachings of John Knox in Edinburgh, or to the soil of Naseby and 
Marston Moor, and to the heart and brain of the greatest of all 
English sovereigns, Oliver Cromwell. Of kindred mind was Lowell 
when he wrote that "the red dint on Charles's block marked one in 
our era." Professor Rogers of Oxford believed that American inde- 
pendence was a glorious result of Holland's successful battle for civil 
and religious freedom against the Spanish monarchy, then dominant 
in the Old World and the New. Carlyle declared that we must go 
back to Luther to find the moral forces which made America possible. 
All these historical students reach true and very similar conclusions. 
It is certain that some of the chief impulses which led to the coloniz- 
ing of the Atlantic seaboard, and the founding and development of 
an independent nation, sprang directly from that era of reformation 
described by the Puritan poet of England: "Then was the sacred 
Bible sought out of the obscure corners where profane falsehood and 
neglect had thrown it, the schools opened, divine and human learn- 
ing raked out of the embers of forgotten tongues, the princes and 
cities trooping apace to the new erected banner of salvation; the 
martyrs, with the unresistible might of weakness, shaking the powers 



of darkness and scorning the fiery rage of the Old Red Dragon." It 
was an echo of the Christian Scriptures which Jefferson sounded in 
the Declaration of American Independence. "We rummaged every- 
where," he wrote, " to find the Biblical formulas of the old Puritans. ' 
" The independent divines of England," wrote Sir James Mackintosh, 
" were the teachers of John Locke." And John Locke was the chief 
teacher of that last of the Puritans, Samuel Adams, who was the 
chief organizer of the American Revolution, and the greatest embodi- 
ment of its ideas. 

Reverting to that earlier genetic period, we find ourselves in the 
midst of great spiritual conflicts in England, Scotland, Holland, 
Germany, Sweden, and France. We find a company of men who, 
whatever their limitations, recognized the supremacy of the Spirit 
and the sovereignty of God. They carried in their brains empires 
surpassing that of Alexander. They believed themselves the agents 
of divine Providence. These men — Carver, Bradford, Winthrop, 
Hooker, Cotton, Davenport, Roger Williams — were men whose 
character made New England, as Mr. Gladstone wrote, '" the centre 
of those commanding influences which gave to the country as a 
whole its political and moral atmosphere." "Our Puritan ances- 
tors," as Lowell said at the Harvard Anniversary, " have been mis- 
represented and maligned by persons without imagination enough 
to make themselves contemporary with and therefore able to under- 
stand the men whose memories they strive to blacken. That happy 
breed of men who both in Church and State led our first emigration 
were children of the most splendid intellectual epoch that England 
has ever known. They were the coevals of a generation which 
passed on, in scarcely diminished radiance, the torch of life kindled 
in great Eliza's golden days." 

I have no sympathy, therefore, with those who would exclude 
New England from the domain of the truest Americanism, remember- 
ing, as I do, our national origin and the circumstances of those vari- 
ous emigrations of ideas and of men which have made the commanding 
epochs of our history. America has had more than one ' ' Mayflower. " 
It was the " MayfloW'-er, " bearing the sons and daughters of New 
England, that landed at Marietta in 1788. It was in New England 
that Rufus Putnam and Manasseh Cutler settled the plan which was 
embodied in the Magna Charta of the Northwest, the Ordinance of 
1787. There is no danger of overestimating, there is peril rather of 
underestimating, the importance of that settlement and the great- 
ness of that Ordinance. Without it, it has been truly said, " the 
Constitution of the United States would have lost half of its value." 



It was one of the miracles of history, indicating the strategy of Prov- 
idence, which sent the founders of the Northwest to Marietta " at 
the precise time when," as Senator Hoar has said, "alone they 
could bring with them the institutions which moulded its destiny. 
A few years earlier or a few years later, and the great Ordinance 
would have been impossible." 

There have been still other " Mayflowers " freighted with New 
England men and ideas, making epochs in our history. One of 
these, bearing Jeremiah Porter and a company of Christian soldiers 
on a stormy voyage over Lake Michigan, landed at the mouth of the 
Chicago River in 1833, and founded the First Church in what was 
to be the metropolis of the West. A " Mayflower " on wheels crossed 
the Rocky Mountains, bearing Marcus Whitman, with a freight so 
precious, with a purpose so high, with a spirit so commanding, that 
the spriritual destinies of empires greater than that of Germany 
were determined by it. Other pilgrims from New England have 
entered the Golden Gate at San Francisco, have penetrated into 
Illinois, Iowa, and Kansas; into Michigan and Wisconsin; have 
crossed the Ohio, the Missouri, and the Tennessee, and have 
carried the seed-corn of new institutions through the fair, broad 
South-land which has recently been annexed, with indissoluble heart- 
allegiance, to the great American commonwealth. New England 
has been a chief instrument in the hand of God in Americanizing 
the imperial Republic. She has been foremost in sustaining the 
activities of this Society, in planting churches in what are now 
populous States, and in making those churches the centers of benefi- 
cent influences wherever their spires point toward heaven. There 
families have been gathered, children taught, God honored, and His 
Day respected. There the divine spirit has led men to the fellow- 
ship of Jesus Christ. There has been fashioned the love of the 
nobler things of human life. Out of the churches have come Chris- 
tian schools, academies, and colleges. Out of them has come the 
spirit which has struck at corrupt legislation, smiting down gambling, 
intemperance, the lottery. Out of them has come the patriotism, 
the high sense of America's Mission, which made the West so grandly 
loyal in the critical years of the Civil War. Without them, the 
cannon-shot against Fort Sumter might have been an explosion shat- 
tering the Republic. 

The spirit of New England, the conviction which emphasizes the 
value of religion and education, has come to be the ruling spirit in 
many of the great States beyond the AUeghanies. Throughout our 
churches, and those of kindred life, there has been growing a pur- 



8 

pose to carry the Gospel everywhere, to send it, like a messenger of 
heaven, across oceans and deserts and barbarous continents, to the 
farthest isles of the sea; a purpose to put this leaven of celestial 
truth into great cities, in the slums as well as the palaces, among 
the outcast and criminal as well as among the learned and luxuri- 
ous. In spite of temporary and sporadic declensions, American 
Christianity, as a whole, has come to a fuller realization of its sacred 
mission. We recognize our obligation to send the Gospel to all 
men, and feel that we have a peculiar responsibility to make our 
own land as Christian as possible. This land is rapidly becoming 
the foremost of the nations of the world. Only a year has passed 
since a Vermont sailor. Admiral George Dewey, anchored Asia off 
our western shores. America is gathering to her own bosom the 
children of all nationalities. The missionaries of this Society preach 
the Gospel in twenty languages. And since the efforts of the next 
few years may determine whether or not the rapidly organizing 
society in some of the communities of the great West, and in all our 
greatest cities, and in our new possessions in both Indies, shall be 
predominantly Christian or pagan, the responsibility has become 
tremendous — indeed, the one chief concern of our lives — to fill this 
nation and all its territories with the light of the knowledge of God. 
As a people we touch Africa on our Atlantic seaboard and 
throughout the vast southern domain. We touch Asia on our Pacific 
coast, the great Spanish populations on our Mexican border, and the 
representatives of all mankind in the streets of every great, flourish- 
ing city, from Boston to Omaha, from Denver to San Francisco, 
from Duluth to San Antonio. Like the lordly city of Bombay — but 
much more strategically and amply — America has become the meet- 
ing place of the nations, a miniature of the globe. When Lyman 
Beecher sixty years ago sounded throughout our churches his mighty 
trumpet-call for aid in western evangelization, he was a prophet and 
a pioneer. But his greatest predictions have been dwarfed by the 
gigantic fulfilments. He did not foresee a time when 12,000 miles 
of new railway would be built every year, the greater part of the 
increase in the Central and Western belts of the country; he did not 
foresee a time when $300,000,000 would be annually expended in 
building up highways for the march of immigration into the South- 
west, the world's pasture-land; into the great Northwest, the w^orWs 
granary; into the great Central West, the world's silver and golden 
storehouse and treasury. He did not see his own city of Cincin- 
nati grown to be larger than New York was in his boyhood, St. Louis 
with a population of more than 500,000, a third of a million people 



gathered in ihe twin cities of the Upper Mississippi, and such 
clusters of commercial capitals as are seen in Texas, Oregon and 
California, and along the fertile banks of the Missouri. He did not 
foresee that western Babylon at the foot of Lake Michigan, one of 
the mightiest growths of time. But though he had seen it all, he 
could not have felt more keenly that the lifeblood of the Gospel 
must be the lifeblood of the Republic, or else it is doomed. 

New perils have come into the foreground since Lyman Beecher's 
day. We have heard from ten thousand tongues that there is a 
strong tendency of modern populations, not only in America but in 
Europe, toward the municipal centers— the statement that the polit- 
ical and moral influences of great communities are increasingly 
dominant over this nation. Thirty years hence the majority of 
American votes will be cast in cities. There is therefore no civic 
virtue more demanded in our life to-day than a wise patriotism, 
especially that form of public spirit which has been called municipal 
patriotism. The latter was the original type of this noble virtue. 

The enthusiasm of the Jew was largely a zeal for his capital city. 
From Babylonian exile he sent his faithful cry across the desert, " If 
I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand forget its cunning." 

It was a somewhat similar devotion in the citizenship of Attica 
which made Athens, during her brief primacy, " the eye of Greece, 
mother of arts and eloquence " On the Tiber the Roman built a 
capital embodying certain ideals, and he called that city imperial 
and divine, and her proudest poet sang of the ancient heroism 
of ^neas, from which there sprang at last the walls of eternal 
Rome. 

The ancient understanding of a city, as Principal Fairbairn has 
said, was not merely "a place where men have most congregated, and 
built to themselves houses and workshops; where the exchange and 
the cathedral stand together — the one for admiration, and the other 
for business; where warerooms run into long, unlovely streets; 
where narrow and unfragrant closes are crowded with the poor, and 
spacious, yet hard, monotonous squares are occupied by the rich." 
The city "expressed all that was ideal in the State, or fatherland." 
The ancient Civitas has become with us the Nation ; but while the 
spirit of national patriotism has been fostered into conquering 
strength, and numbers among its trophies the proudest names of our 
century — Bolivar, Bismarck, Kossuth, Cavour, O'Connell, Abraham 
Lincoln — the spirit of civic and municipal patriotism has not had an 
equal development, and is enriched with but few splendid victories. 
It seems strange that men who would die for their country are will- 



lO 



ing to see their own city given up to the control of shameless 
" boodlers," compared with whom the robber-barons of the Middle 
Ages were bands of foreign missionaries, ready for canonization. 
There is immense and pressing need that the spirit of the ancient 
freedom should again be aroused. It was the great towns of the 
Netherlands that earliest caught the fire from Luther's torch. Mu- 
nicipal liberty was achieved in European cities in advance of nation- 
ality, and the history of man's intellectual, political and commercial 
emancipation sweeps in a brilliant, though often bloody, procession 
through the streets of Athens and Florence, of Ghent and Bruges, 
of Leyden and Amsterdam, of Antwerp and Geneva. 

We know that among the future possibilities of American life 
are a heathenism and wretchedness, concentrated in some American 
London, approaching the awful brutality and misery depicted bv the 
General of the Salvation Army in "Darkest England" — where the 
cry of distress, breaking from those pestilential rookeries, is wrung 
from lips purple with alcohol and crimson with fever. It is the city, 
which Biblical inspiration makes the type of an inhuman, material 
civilization — that Babylon which is yet to be destroyed, whose mer- 
chants shall mourn as they stand afar off and see the smoke of its 
burning; the city, whose merchandise is gold, and silver, and precious 
stones, and pearls, and fine linen, and scarlet, and all manner of 
vessels of iron, and brass, and marble, and cinnamon, and odors, and 
ointments, frankincense, and wine, and oil, and fine flour, and wheat, 
and beasts, and sheep, and horses, and chariots, and slaves^ and the souls 
of men. Is not many a civilized metropolis rapidly becoming a ruth- 
less machine, wherein are ground up the souls of men ? 

Voices far more influential than mine have been urging New 
York and Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis, Cincinnati and San 
Francisco, to awake out of sleep. When from the heavy ordnance 
of an Eastern navy yard thirty-seven sunset guns were fired in honor 
of the thirty-seven States, we are told that a very deaf woman, living 
in the neighborhood, looked up from her knitting, after the last 
thunderous report, and meekly said, "Come in." She had just 
become conscious that something noisy was going on ; and there are 
tens of thousands of fairly good people dwelling in our cities, who, 
after all the artillery and dynamite of the last ten years, are finally 
beginning to understand that mischief is brewing; and I hope that 
they will be willing for a moment to withdraw from their terrible 
absorption in business life, and to say to the better era that is 
thundering at their door, "For the sake of God and humanity, 
come in!" I believe that the fire of a divinely-kindled patriotism 



II 



is not dead, but it needs to be turned, with destructive ardor, against 
the chief political evils of the Republic. 

We must not dream that our excellent system of government is 
a panacea for such corrupting ills. Unless the Government is con- 
ducted by wise and good men, it will no more prevent and abolish 
such evils than a velvet coat will keep off the Russian grtJ>J>e. Public 
sentiment is a lymph of great healing power, which should be 
injected into a corrupted municipality; but, unfortunately, the public 
sentiment which makes itself most clamorously heard by ma3'ors and 
aldermen gets its diabolical inspiration from the deeps of the sour- 
mash tub, and finds its business in coining fortunes out of human 
frailty and sin. I am informed that the stay-at-home vote in a 
single ward of Chicago gave the control of that city, a few years ago, 
to the saloon power that still very largely governs it. Since the 
caucus, the convention and the polling-booth are the real political 
sovereigns in America, men who are faithless here cannot claim to be 
model patriots or good citizens. Mr. Henry C. Lea, of Philadelphia, 
has shown that city maladministration is not to be attributed to the 
poor so much as to the men of high social position and character, 
who are not so worthy to exercise the right of suffrage as the most 
ignorant foreigner, because they refuse to exercise it, or allow their 
blind partisanship to enlist them in the support of bad candidates. 

De Tocqueville perceived, sixty years ago, that the city, through 
political corruption, was to be a chief menace to our freedom; and 
we are living to-day amid some of the frightful realities which 
he predicted. Our municipal evils are rightly attributed by Professor 
Bryce to the strength of party loyalty in things where no political 
principle is involved. The trouble, also, is that so many men's 
pockets control their politics; they weakly imagine that they cannot 
afford to follow their consciences; they are determined not to offend 
their patrons; they prefer to sell their principles to get a larger sale 
for their goods. As Dante, the Florentine patriot, who cherished 
even in exile the lilied loveliness of the city of the Arno, looked 
upon her fierce factions as the spotted panther which impeded his 
poetic way up the mount of vision, so, fierce, unmeaning factions 
obstruct the elevation of our municipalities. Therefore, an educa- 
tional and moral campaign should be reinaugurated and continued. 

I have been delighted in the last few months to notice many 
indications of a purpose in some of our cities, small and great, to 
make them beautiful with gardens and parks, to cleanse their 
streets of foulness, and to decorate them with monuments of art. 
The greatest art the world has ever known came from republican 



1 2 



Athens, republican Holland, and the fair, free cities of Italy. Art 
has a gracious and beautiful ministry, if it is pure and genuine. But 
there are some things which art cannot do. Paris cannot cure her 
sensualities with pictures any more than she could kill the Commune 
with a canvas, even though Delacroix has covered it with matchless 
colorings or Millet has filled it with heavenly-minded peasants. To 
some of you, art in Paris may seem like a pearl on the neck of the 
demimonde, and art in Chicago or New York may seem to you like 
a diamond on a soiled and ragged robe. And though art may give 
a grace and splendor and dignity to municipal life, as in the cities 
of Italy and the Netherlands; though it may widen and brighten the 
field of human thought, and even serve the moralities, there are 
things of far deeper concern, which commend themselves to our 
consciences and our conduct. Say all that you please about the 
refining influences of culture, and about better laws and institutions, 
the primary and fundamental requirement is better men, a more 
Christian character. It is not more and richer universities that 
America most needs, but more and stronger Christian colleges. 
Legislation and social panaceas, and all human contrivances, are vain 
unless the heart be renewed. What said the statesman-prophet of 
Israel, Isaiah ? "My well beloved hath a vineyard in a very fruitful 
hill: and he fenced it, and gathered out the stones thereof, and 
planted it with the choicest vine, and built a tower in the midst of it, 
and made a winepress therein: and he looked that it should bring 
forth grapes, and it brought forth wild grapes." How many his- 
toric vineyards, how many fair institutions, have thus disappointed 
expectation! I do not look upon religion as a last resort of a people 
grown desperate in trying vainly other remedies. That seems to be 
the condition in France as described in the appeals of Brunetiere 
and others. Religion, which is essential to conscientiousness, must 
enter the very beginnings and foundations of life. 

A traveler in a hotel in Washington, noticing the fire-escape at 
the window, and a Bible lying on the table, said to a servant, 
"What are these things for?" "The ladder at the window is to 
help you escape if the hotel is on fire." "I understand that," said 
the traveler; " but what is the use of the Bible ? " " That, sir, is to 
be used when the fire is so far advanced that you can't escape by the 
ladder." 

The builders of America, the founders of Hartford, and the 
Christian pioneers of Chicago and other cities, acted on a different 
conviction. The Word of God was foremost in their thoughts; and 
if there is to be anything permanently glorious in American city 



13 

life, it must descend, like the New Jerusalem, in Apocalyptic vision, 
coming down from God out of heaven. The history of our race, 
which began in the Garden, finds its goal and the fulfilment of its 
highest ideals in that Holy City, the Civitas Dei, into which the glory 
and honor of the nations shall be carried. If this splendid vision is to 
be realized in the faintest measure in American cities, it will be 
through the agencies which have made other cities strong in right- 
eousness. You must Christianize if you would Americanize and 
civilize the complex population of Germans, Scandinavians, Irish- 
men, Hollanders, Frenchmen, Russians, Italians, Bohemians, Hun- 
garians, Poles, Arabs, Syrians, Africans and Chinese. There is 
something startling in the fact that, as Lyman Abbott has said, 
"We cling to the same strap in the horse-car with men who never 
read the New Testament." I thoroughly sympathize with all that 
Dr. Albert Shaw and Dr. Parkhurst, Washington Gladden and Presi- 
dent Low, have said of the need of securing honest business methods 
in city administration, and I also believe that the best missionary 
work on earth to-day is the planting of churches and mission schools 
and kindergartens in our great cities, the most neglected parts of 
America. 

When rich men affirm that they can find no safe and wise use 
for their money in public-spirited charities, they reveal the grossest 
ignorance. When multitudes are starving for the bread of life, and 
children are crying with hunger for the bread which feeds the body; 
when home missionaries are half paid on our frontiers and worrying 
that they have no means of sending their children to college, and 
vital charities and moral enterprises of great pith and moment are 
made futile, is there a much more abominable spectacle than that 
which was recently described: a man, made suddenly rich, exhaust- 
ing his intelligence and that of Delmonico's assistants in the prodig- 
ious effort to expend ten thousand dollars on a single dinner? 
" Whose glory is their shame, whose god is their belly." The ideal 
citizen is not a man who is merely a clothed and animated roll of 
bank stock and railroad bonds ! O young millionaire of to-day, 
living amid such splendid opportunities, with God's riches intrusted 
to you, set your face against a selfish life, against the ostentatious 
vulgarities which recent books have opened to our view in the 
American metropolis, the social contentions where chef vies with 
chef, and butler strives with butler, and wine-cellar contends with 
wine-cellar, and where Worth and Redfern are the Achilles and 
Hector of the social battlefield! Heaven save our cities from such 
ignoble Iliads! 



14 

But I thank God that America has been rich, and is now rich, 
witfi men — masters of material things, princes of commerce, leaders 
of finance — who have been rich toward God. No other nation has 
such a roll call of faithful, consecrated millionaires as America. 
This society honors them, our colleges honor them, our imperiled 
ciiies honor them. No men of our nation bear heavier burdens or 
have done larger things. It would be invidious to name a few of 
them when hundreds deserve our gratitude and our praise. They 
stand between us and grave degeneracies. They brighten our faith 
in the Republic and in the Kingdom of God. 

But we have not gathered here to-night to contemplate dole- 
fully what yet remains to be done. We are not pessimists, especially 
in a year like this, when our national life has been as much exalted 
as expanded. We do not forget that God rules, and that He has 
fulfilled His gracious purposes toward us in the past, in times and 
ways we least expected. To be despondent is to forget God and 
what He has already wrought. Pessimism and atheism are owlets 
from the same nest. I have not discovered among those whose 
hearts are fired with missionary enthusiasm any disposition to 
despair, and rarely any tendency toward malignant cynicism or 
moral hysterics. "Our helm," as Emerson wrote, "is given up to 
a better guidance than our own. The course of events is quite too 
strong for any helmsman, and our little wherry is taken in tow by 
the ship of the Great Admiral, which knows the way, and which has 
the force to draw men and states and planets to their goal." And 
surely, they who believe in a moral order administered by infinite 
love and wisdom — manifest in a nationality now so splendid and 
various, which was not planned as a warehouse or a glittering 
exchange, but rather as a temple wherein God should abide, a dwell- 
ing-place for the Invisible, more resplendent than "the Mount of 
Alabaster topped with golden spires" which once blazed on the 
summit of Moriah — may find their faith and expectation worthily 
expressed by the most patriotic of our poets: 

" God of our fathers, Thou who wast, 

Art, and shalt be when those eye-wise who flout 

Thy secret presence, shall be lost 

In the great light that dazzles them to doubt ; 

We, sprung from loins of stalwart men 
Whose strength was in their trust 
That Thou wouldst make Thy dwelling in their dust, 

And walk with them a fellow-citizen, 
Who build a city of the just ; 



15 

We, who believe life's bases rest 
Beyond the probe of chemic test, 

Still, like our fathers, feel Thee near, 
Sure that, while lasts the immutable decree, 

The land to human nature dear 
Shall not be unbeloved by Thee." 

And since our nationality has had a heavenly birth, it is right to 
expect from it notable additions to the political, intellectual and 
moral achievements of mankind. A grim English critic once sneered 
at America by saying that it had never done a greatly noble thing. 
Is there nothing greatly noble in converting a continent vaster than 
Caesar's empire with the arts of civilization ? Is there nothing 
greatly noble in the colossal achievements of incorporating 10,000,- 
ooo of foreign and somewhat alien population, unused to self-govern- 
ment, and by means of the common-school and the exercise of 
liberty largely Americanizing the prodigious immigration ? Is 
there nothing greatly noble in the sudden and marvelous growth of 
science, invention and literature on this side of the sea ? Is there 
nothing greatly noble in the working of our national Constitution in 
times of peril, the Government continuing without a jar after the 
assassination of two Presidents, events that would have shaken many 
a European throne ? Is there nothing to draw out one word of 
cheerful augury in our successful encounter of such a peril as 
slavery, which England and George III. fastened upon us; of such 
dangers as rebellion and inflated currency and a disputed presiden- 
tial election ? Is there nothing greatly noble in a population most 
of whom are delivered from the measureless misery which is the lot 
of millions in the Old World ? Is there nothing greatly noble in the 
valor and self-sacrifice with which both armies contended in the 
late Civil War ? Why shall not Gettysburg take rank with Marathon 
in the history of human liberty ? Are not the waters of Hampton 
Roads, covering "the soft ooze where the Cumberland lies," as 
sacred as Athenian Salamis ? I know we have many occasions for 
humility and for solemn concern when we think of the perils beset- 
ting us to-day, from lawlessness and the increase of crime, especially 
from the despotic liquor power and a vicious spoils-system in city 
governments. But we have so jnai?y occasions for rejoicing and 
gratitude that we should not keep company with despondency for an 
hour, nor with despair for an instant. 

It has been the teaching of our greatest statesmen that the 
maintenance and spread of religion were essential to our safety and 
prosperity. De Tocqueville said that despotism may govern with- 



i6 

out Faith, but liberty cannot. Ours is the only great nation where 
the Christian religion has had a fair field, unencumbered by state 
alliances. A hundred years ago the Methodist churches had only a 
a handful of congregations. They now number more communicants 
than there were then people in the country. The Baptists, who 
were then mildly persecuted North and South, have to-day three 
millions of members. The Congregational churches in New Eng- 
land were not then entirely disestablished, and when their severance 
from the state occurred it proved a blessing and not a curse. The 
Episcopal Church in Virginia, whose parsons were discredited on 
account of their Tory leanings, and who had become so dissolute 
that the legislature found it needful to pass special laws prohibiting 
them from drunkenness, was disestablished in 1785, and thence- 
forward, under the great leadership of Bishop Meade and others, 
the church of Madison and Washington began its better life, and 
to-day numbers more communicants than were in all the American 
churches at the opening of the century. A hundred years ago the 
Presbyterian churches were often built with funds raised by means 
of lotteries, while drunkenness prevailed in all ranks, among clergy 
and people, to an almost incredible extent. The temperance reform 
is one of the brightest pages of the past century, and we ought to 
thank God that in a hundred years most of the liquor has gone out 
of the veins of the American church, although it must be sadly con- 
fessed that the political power of the liquor-interest was never more 
despotic and destructive. 

At the beginning of this century French infidelity ruled the 
educated classes of America, and Christianity was thought to be 
speedily doomed. But what has been the outcome ? In 1800 there 
were only 350,000 church members in a population of 5,000,000, or 
one in fourteen; while to-day, out of a population of 75,000,000, 
there are 21,000,000 church members, or one in three and six-tenths, 
including a Roman Catholic population of 8,000,000. When we 
reflect that the numerical strength of the church has augmented 
three times as rapidly as the population; when we note the rise and 
progress of Sunday Schools which this century has witnessed; when 
we recall the fact that nearly all the great missionary, philanthropic 
and reformatory societies are less than a hundred year§ old; when 
we contemplate the vast sums that are given for Christian education, 
and watch the troops of colleges which, as Mr. Beecher once said, 
"go lowing along over our Western plains like Jacob's kine;"and as 
we joyfully remember that on every day seven new church buildings 
are erected on the soil covered by the national flag, and that on 



17 

ever}^ Lord's day 15,000 new confessors of the Divine Man of Naza- 
reth are enrolled beneath the standard of the cross, we surely have 
good reason for believing that Washington's hope, expressed in his 
first inaugural, has been realized, and that our people still render 
their dutiful homage to the great Author of every public and private 
good. And besides all this, there has been a great sifting and 
simplifying of doctrines, a happy dying out of sectarian animosities, 
a growth of mutual love and confidence among the Christian denomi- 
nations, a magnifying of likenesses and minifying of differences, a 
decay of rigid theological system-building and increased devotion 
to Bible study, and a growing willingness to combine in works of 
charity and reform. And surely these are signs of hopeful progress 
worthy to take rank with any of the marvels of invention or with 
the growth of our national area and the expansion of our national 

power! 

The perils already passed and the precious things already 
gained ought never to be forgotten when our eager minds are 
fastened on the new things which seem so desirable. There are but 
few blessings which the nation now covets which are worth mention- 
ing, compared with the blessings already secured; compared with 
the peace of our homes, the general safety from violence which, in 
the name of law, plunders a man's pockets as in Turkey, or takes 
away his freedom as in Russia; compared with right to choose 
one's occupation, which more than one half of our race do not yet 
possess; compared with liberty of travel, of speech, of worship, of 
assembly; compared with all those circumstances which in this 
country beckon us with friendly hands and cheer us with kindly 
voices, and do not, as in so many lands, crush down the aspiring 

manhood. 

The rights and opportunities possessed by us have been won by 
the tears and toils of sixty centuries, by the labors of men of whom 
the world was not worthy, dying without the sight of the Canaan 
into which we have entered. What if Stephen, stoned at the gate of 
Jerusalem, could have seen Christianity enthroned in the Roman 
Empire! What if Athanasius, holding out alone against the world, 
could have seen modern Christendom embracing the leading nation- 
alities England carrying the Bible in every ship that wakes the 

"countless laughter of the sea," and America with church bells 
echoing from spire to spire, from the shores of hundred-harbored 
Maine to the soft-fiowing waves of the Pacific ! What if Socrates, 
dying a martyr to intellectual liberty; what if Milton, writing his 
noble plea for unlicensed printing; what if the martyrs of Holland 



i8 

and Scotland, dying for civil freedom, could have witnessed the 
spectacle of a free state enshrining and defending a free church, 
which is the glory of our nation ! What if Joseph Warren, closing 
his eyes in death beneath the flag of Bunker Hill, could have seen 
Cornwallis surrendering the British army at Yorktown ! What if 
Washington, assuming the presidency of 4,000,000 impoverished 
Americans, could have foreseen this Continental Republic with 
75,000,000 of the most prosperous and progressive people on the 
globe! What if Lovejoy, shot down at Alton for defending a funda- 
mental principle of liberty; or Garrison, dragged through the streets 
of Boston with a halter around his neck, could then have seen the 
last fetter broken from the last American slave! What if Ellsworth, 
dying at Alexandria in the darkened dawn of the mighty struggle, 
could have seen the victorious armies of Sherman, Logan and 
Howard, and Sheridan and Grant, march over the Long Bridge into 
the streets of Washington, and pour their flashing columns and 
carry their tattered standards, in battalions majestic as the oncoming 
waves of the sea, under the eyes of an assembled nation! By a 
hundred bloody steps on 

"The world's great altar-stairs, 
^ That slope through darkness up to God," 

humanity has ascended to the heights on which we breathe. Let us 
not, in our thoughtlessness and folly, forget the great things which 
God has done for us, not only in the remoter past, but under our very 
eyes! While we confer in regard to the evangelization of America, 
there is assembled in the little Palace of the Woods, outside The 
Hague, ''The cradle of science and international law," a Congress, 
whether for Peace, Disarmament or Arbitration, which many deem 
a far-off prophecy of "The Parliament of Man, the Federation of the 
World." 

The last year has been one of surprises. It is impossible to put 
ourselves back into the egg-shell of one year ago. No one foresaw 
what was to occur, not even the President. How wondrously God 
has educated us, as he educated the nation in the ideas of liberty 
during the agonizing Civil War! Under the red torch of battle, 
dull minds discern what has been hidden from them before. America 
has come to a clearer perception of herself, her mission, her duty, 
her destiny. In a new and unexampled sense she has become a 
world-power. Other peoples, too, are beginning to understand us, 
and our position. Some of them did not comprehend our motives. 
England, however, did. Outside of Anglo-Saxon liberty, the region 



19 



influenced by Puritan and Biblical Christianity, there has been a 
feeble comprehension of true Americanism, the real spirit of the 
Republic America was usually thought of merely as a fat, pros- 
perous, conceited, lawless, uneducated mass of vulgar people. But 
our brief war for humanity struck this great bulk of ignorance and 
preiudice and has sho.vn that we are strong where we were thought 
to be weak. Our good fighters did more to open the dull eyes of 
Europe than our good scholars. It is a shameful fact, for it shows 
how primitive, as yet, is the general European mind. Now that we 
have come to a new standing and prestige in the world of action, 
what we signify in the world of thought and religion will make a 
deeper impression. The recent war has not been one of the great 
conflicts of history, except in its humane spirit and purpose, and in 
its results It was the last struggle between the Middle Ages and 
the Declaration of Independence, between the Inquisition and the 
common school, between intolerance and tyranny and the compact 
in the " iMayflower." And we find ourselves at the close of it alert, 
self-confident, rejoicing in a reunited country, and yet sobered by a 
sense not of new responsibilities merely, but of old responsibilities 
brought nearer home to the conscience and heart. We should not 
be boastful, and we should not be doubtful. We have great tasks, 
but we have a great people, wise leaders, a high purpose, and an 
immeasurable power for good. The croakers were never more cyni- 
cal and never less influential. It is surely not an occasion for 
despondency that the nation which represents liberty, humanity the 
purpose to maintain civilization and order, the spiritual forces of the 
Gospel, the purpose to uplift the poor, and large measures of the 
mind of Jesus Christ, should have back of it the greatest material 
resources of any nation. But material resources alone cannot save 
us The flesh profiteth nothing; it is the Spirit that giveth life. It 
only can transform material agencies into messengers of light and 
redemption, and encompass all our rocks and shores and templed 
hills with the enduring radiance of the moral law. 

What we need to-day is a larger-minded comprehension of a 
more than continental problem, and an adequate response to a more 
than continental need. At the close of his great speech on Concili- 
ation in America, perhaps the greatest speech in our language, 
Edmund Burke said: "Magniminity in politics is not seldom the 
truest wisdom, and a great empire and little minds go ill together. 
Let us get an American revenue as we have gotten an American 
empire English privileges have made it all it is; English privileges 
alone will make it all it can be." Surely here is inspiration even for 



20 



Christian enterprise, and we may say, in the spirit of Burke, that 
the Gospel of Christ has made America all that it is, and that the 
Gospel of Christ alone will make it all that it can be. It is a stain 
on our piety and patriotism that debt should ever cling to this great 
Society. Let us gladden our secretaries, and our hundreds of self- 
sacrificing home-missionary families, east and west, by removing 
that stain. With a general revival of deep, intelligent loyalty and 
fidelity to the missionary cause, that shadow would float from our 
horizon as the shadow of Spain's 400 years of baleful dominion in the 
New World vanished with the drifting cannon-smoke over the walls 
and shores of Santiago. 

On the shield of the church of Scotland is the image of the 
"Burning Bush," with the encompassing words, '"''Nee tamen consume- 
datur" — "Nor was it yet consumed." On the shield of the church of 
Ireland is the image of the " Burning Bush," with the words, ''''Ardens 
sed virens'' — " Burning, but flourishing." The Huguenot church of 
France bears on its shield the image of the "Burning Bush," with 
the words, '■'Flagror non consumor" — " I burn, but am not consumed." 
The old evangelical church of Germany had on its shield the same 
image of the "Burning Bush." The unquenched life of God flaming 
in his church, the supreme power and the supreme evidence of 
Christianity — such was the thought of the men who signed in their 
own blood old Scotland's league and Covenant on the tombstones of 
the Gray Friars' churchyard ; of the men who made the North of 
Ireland the beacon-light of Protestantism and the nursery of heroes; 
of the men who lifted the banner of Christ high over the sunny 
plains of France, and whose faith, not drowned in the blood of 
St. Bartholomew's Day, is now once more the nation's regenerating 
life. Such was the thought of the God-fearing men who laid at 
Plymouth the corner stone of the greatest of Republics. We need 
not despair of the future. The divine life which has glowed through 
all the years of our history will not fail us now. 



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